Billing

Mengi Cloud bills you for what you actually run. Every cluster is metered per second while it’s running, charges accumulate as a balance on your account, and we collect that balance automatically from your payment method — either when it reaches a threshold or once a month. Every successful charge comes with a downloadable invoice.

There are no upfront payments and no minimum commitment: delete your resources and the meter stops.

What you pay for

Your bill has up to two kinds of line items:

Line item	What it is
Platform fee	A flat fee per cluster, per month — based on the cluster’s tier (Development, Dedicated, or Dedicated HA). Metered per second of running time, so a cluster that runs for half a month costs half the fee.
Infrastructure	The compute, storage and bandwidth from the cloud provider, passed through at the provider’s actual rate, with no markup. Only applies to clusters whose infrastructure Mengi provisions for you.

Current platform fees for each cluster tier (Development, Dedicated, and Dedicated HA) are listed on the pricing page.

Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

If a cluster runs in your own cloud account (BYOC), the split is simple:

You pay your cloud provider directly for all infrastructure — servers, load balancers, storage, traffic. That bill never touches Mengi.
You pay Mengi only the flat platform fee for the cluster’s tier.

So a BYOC cluster appears on your Mengi invoice as a single platform-fee line, and the infrastructure stays on your existing cloud bill, under your existing discounts and agreements.

How metering works

Every running cluster is metered per second, with a one-minute minimum. Clusters that are stopped, deleting or failed don’t accrue charges.
Workloads that run on a cluster — deployments, managed databases — are covered by that cluster’s metering: on the Development (shared) tier your price can grow with the resources you reserve, while dedicated clusters are priced by the nodes they run.
Each metering interval adds to your account balance, which you can see at any time on the Billing page.

Setting up a payment method

You add a payment method once; after that, all charges happen automatically.

Open Billing in the dashboard and choose Set up payment.
You’re taken to a secure checkout hosted by our payment provider, where you complete a small one-time verification charge (a few cents).
The verification charge is automatically refunded — it exists only to confirm the payment method and authorise future automatic charges.
Back in the dashboard, your payment method shows as verified and you receive a confirmation email.

We accept credit cards, iDEAL and SEPA direct debit (availability can depend on your country). The Billing page shows which method is on file — e.g. the card brand and last digits, or a masked IBAN.

A verified payment method comes with a credit limit (€50 to start) — the maximum balance your account can accumulate between charges. The Billing page shows your current balance, your credit limit and the credit you have left.

You can update your payment method at any time (same flow — the verification charge is refunded again), or remove it once you have no active clusters or deployments.

When we charge you

New accounts use threshold billing:

We automatically charge your payment method when your balance reaches €50.
Monthly floor: if your usage is light and you haven’t been charged for about a month, we collect whatever balance you’ve accumulated anyway — as long as it’s at least €1. Balances under €1 simply roll over until they’re worth collecting.

In short: you’re charged when your balance reaches €50, or roughly monthly, whichever comes first.

Monthly billing is available as an alternative 30 days after your payment method is verified: your full balance is collected once a month on a fixed cycle, regardless of the amount. Switching modes is currently done via the API (PATCH /billing/billing-mode); switching back to threshold billing is always allowed.

Every successful charge resets your balance to zero, sends you a confirmation email and generates an invoice.

If a payment fails

A failed charge is not the end of the world — there’s a clear path back:

You’re notified by email each time a charge fails, and the Billing page shows the failure.
As your remaining credit runs low you receive warning emails (at 10% and 5% of your credit limit remaining).
Your account is only suspended if a charge has actually failed and your credit limit is exhausted — you always get a chance to pay first.
Once suspended, your resources are scheduled for deletion after a 7-day grace period, and you’re told the exact date by email.

To recover: make sure your payment method works (update it from the Billing page if needed). Charges are retried automatically, and a successful payment of the outstanding balance reactivates your account immediately — the suspension is lifted and the scheduled deletion is cancelled. If the grace period passes without payment, your clusters and deployments are deleted.

Viewing your usage

In the dashboard, the Billing page shows:

Current balance — charges accrued but not yet collected.
Credit limit and available credit.
Payment method on file, with options to update or remove it.
Payment history — every charge with its date, amount, status (completed, pending, failed, refunded) and a Download invoice button.

Via the API, the same data is available for automation:

GET /usage/current — balance, credit and the current month’s usage.
GET /usage/summary?period_days=30 — totals for a period, optionally filtered to a single deployment.
GET /usage/history — the individual metering records, each with the cluster, resources, time span and cost.
GET /billing/transactions — your payment history.

See Getting started with the API for authentication.

Invoices and invoice settings

Every successful charge produces an invoice, sent to you by email and downloadable from the payment history on the Billing page.

By default invoices are addressed to your account email. If you bill through a company, configure invoice settings on your organisation (organisation admins and owners can edit them):

Company name and billing contact email (invoices go there instead).
Address, postal code, city and country.
VAT number (optional, for businesses).

VAT

Prices are exclusive of VAT. The VAT on your invoice depends on your country and VAT registration:

Your situation	VAT on the invoice
In the Netherlands	Dutch VAT (21%)
EU business with a validated VAT number	0% — reverse charge (you account for VAT yourself)
EU customer without a validated VAT number	Your country’s standard VAT rate
Outside the EU	No VAT (export)

When you enter a VAT number it is validated against the official EU (VIES) registry — you can check it before saving, and a valid number shows the registered company name. Only a validated VAT number qualifies for the reverse-charge treatment and appears on your invoices. If you change your country, the VAT number must be re-validated (it’s country-specific); a re-verify option is available in the settings.

Good to know

Billing is per second with a one-minute minimum — deleting a cluster stops its charges immediately; you never pay for a full month you didn’t use.
All amounts are in euros (EUR), exclusive of VAT.
The verification charge is always refunded — setting up or updating a payment method costs you nothing.
Set up invoice settings before your first charge if you need company details or reverse-charge VAT on your invoices — invoices are generated at the moment of payment.
BYOC clusters never incur infrastructure charges from Mengi — only the platform fee. Watch your cloud provider’s own billing console for the infrastructure side.
A payment method can only be removed when you have no active clusters or deployments — otherwise there’d be running resources with no way to pay for them.